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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What person is NOT included in the ranks of Russian formalists?
(a) Viktor Shklovsky.
(b) Roman Jakobson.
(c) Boris Tomashevsky.
(d) Heinrich Wolffin.

2. What is the name of the economist Eagleton discusses in his preface?
(a) I. Fischer.
(b) Gordon Tuck.
(c) Adam Smith.
(d) J. M. Keynes.

3. What is the German word for how reality is not objective, but experienced and organized by an individual subject?
(a) Wendepunkt.
(b) Bildungsroman.
(c) Lebenswelt.
(d) Vorgeschichte.

4. How many decades, according to Eagleton, has there been a "striking proliferation of literary theory" since the publication of the Russian formalist's pioneering essay?
(a) Two.
(b) Five.
(c) One.
(d) Six.

5. What is the name Edmund Husserl gave to his philosophical method?
(a) New criticism.
(b) Reception theory.
(c) Hermeneutics.
(d) Phenomenology.

6. According to Eagleton, eighteenth-century literature embodied more than social values, it also was an instrument for what?
(a) Violence and abdication.
(b) Entrenchment and dissemination.
(c) Religion and redemption.
(d) Education and oppression.

7. In the eighteenth-century, what was the whole body of writing in society considered, including philosophy, letters, history, poems, and essays?
(a) Theory.
(b) Religion.
(c) Literature.
(d) Canon.

8. According to Eagleton, why is E.D. Hirsch able to maintain his view that literary meaning is absolute and resistant to historical change?
(a) Because meaning is viewed as pre-historic.
(b) Because meaning is viewed as pre-linguistic.
(c) Because meaning is viewed as pre-arranged.
(d) Because meaning is viewed as pre-modern.

9. What period did our own definition of literature begin to emerge, according to Eagleton?
(a) Modernist period.
(b) Victorian period.
(c) Romantic period.
(d) Enlightenment period.

10. For Eagleton, Gadamer's theory only holds if one makes what "enormous assumption"?
(a) That there is a single, mainstream tradition.
(b) That there is a single, mainstream modernity.
(c) That there are multiple traditions.
(d) That there are multiple modernities.

11. What kind of language does Eagleton say people think of literature as?
(a) Ordinary.
(b) Strange.
(c) Dull.
(d) Difficult.

12. During the last decades of the eighteenth-century, the word prosaic begins to acquire what a kind of connotation?
(a) A unfamiliar connotation.
(b) A negative connotation.
(c) A familiar connotation.
(d) A positive connotation.

13. According to Eagleton, the approaches outlined in his book have implications where?
(a) Well beyond politics.
(b) Well beyond language.
(c) Well beyond feeling.
(d) Well beyond literature.

14. What word does Eagleton discuss that is both a descriptive term to mean "literally untrue" as well as an evaluative term to mean "visionary" or "inventive"?
(a) Unimaginative.
(b) Idealistic.
(c) Unrealistic.
(d) Imaginative.

15. According to Eagleton, what kind of thought does literary education NOT encourage?
(a) Analytical thought.
(b) Irrational thought.
(c) Rational thought.
(d) Creative thought.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Eagleton, Stanley Fish's model excludes the possibility that there is a ______ of interpretations?

2. Eagleton argues that for Stanley Fish, what a text "does" to us is a matter of what we do to what?

3. Who was Husserl's most famous pupil who broke with his system of thought?

4. Eagleton argues that the readership his book has attracted dispels the notion that literary theory is what?

5. Eagleton argues that if literature includes much factual writing, it also excludes "quite a lot of" what?

(see the answer keys)

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